This study estimates the impact on driving energy of differences in aerodynamic characteristics for yaw angle from natural wind during North American Highway mode driving. A previous study [1] clarified the potential to estimate the fuel consumption impact of natural wind by integrating the drag coefficient yaw characteristics and yaw angle occurrence probability. The natural wind was measured on a vehicle while driving a representative North American Highway test course [2]. Driving energy is predicted from the obtained yaw probability and the drag coefficient yaw sweep data in a wind tunnel.
Measurements were conducted every weekday for 8 hours in 2023, covering 70% of the traffic volume. The validity of the measurement period was evaluated by the deviation from the annual average of wind direction and speed.
Since yaw probability varies depending on the road environment, it is necessary to weigh the road environment type probability when calculating the driving energy. The probability was calculated using machine learning from more than 490,000 images of North American Highways. Based on the obtained natural wind data, a yaw probability model was created for each vehicle speed in the US Highway driving mode. An evaluation method for the driving energy was constructed from data before and after the improvement of the drag coefficient yaw characteristics.
This evaluation method is based on verification results from actual driving data. By using the yaw probability distribution that considers the road environment and traffic volume of the North American highway, the impact of the yaw angle due to natural wind on driving energy can be numerically estimated. According to this method, for a specific the drag coefficient yaw sweep characteristic with a 13 ct improvement in the drag coefficient at a 6-degree yaw angle, this would result in an improvement in drive energy of approximately 1% on real US highways.
This is an important indicator for optimizing aerodynamic characteristics, and suggests a development direction that can improve fuel efficiency in the real world by optimizing the vehicle shape while taking into account the yaw angle caused by natural wind.